This is a personal question, and I think there is no one right answer as to what constitutes your personal values. What matters most to you is what matters most for you. To be able to truly create a life with meaning, you have to be honest with yourself as to what you think is/are the most important thing(s) in life. We can all rattle off a list of the things we say are most important (many of the items below are on most our lists I’m sure), but does the way we live our lives match up to what we say is important? Beliefs, family expectations, community expectations, gender expectations, and a whole long list of other things can influence what we say is important. But how do you measure what actually is important to you?
- What things occupy your thoughts? What do you obsess about?
- What you spend time doing is what you find most important.
- What you help others do, how you help others reach their goals and dreams, reflects what you find important.
- How you react in times of great crisis or great elation can point to what you truly find important.
For many people, the honest answers to these four questions may be alarming in that they do not paint the idealistic picture we would like. For my own life, I am asking: how do I make what I say is important match what I act on as important?
Dominant Personal Values: A few admirable ways people center their lives, in no particular order:
- People. Some people value people more than things, ideas, events, success, or anything else. These are the caretakers and healers of the world, the keepers of the hearth. It could be people in general, a particular group or family, or an individual person. Make sure if you are putting people first that you don’t hold what you are doing for the person or person against them. If people really are the most important elements of life to you, you can give and support others without placing demands on them. otherwise, perhaps what you really value in life is control.
- Higher Power. Belief and service to a higher power guides so many lives, and can have many benefits: place to put your burdens/worries, sense of connection with everything in the world, creating a framework and scope to navigate the complex, large and often frightening universe. This is an admirable path in life, just make sure to stay connected to other people and grounded to the earth enough to actually survive.
- Ideas. Intellectuals and creative people in particular often values ideas or even one specific idea as a way to build a life’s work and sense of meaning. This perspective can lead you in many unexpected directions, to far-flung places you never expected, and to meet the most important people in your life.
- Achievement/Success/ Goals. The process of setting out to accomplish something and then creating the discipline and developing the patience to achieve these goals might seem shallow compared with the other items on the list, but the great feeling of accomplishment, the pulling of your inner reserves and making yourself stronger in various ways works very well for some people. If this is how you approach life and what you give importance to, don’t feel you have to be ashamed. Listen to your inner voice and it will guide you to other people and to the moral center and sense of contentedness you need.
Most of us use a combination of these and other strategies/perspectives throughout our lives. Most of us, after giving it serious thought, realize we naturally have one thing that drives us and we feel is the greatest thing in life.